[lug] fetchmail

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke D. Stimits
> I'm going to install fetchmail to download but not delete messages, as a
> general backup mechanism (since NS has hosed my mail twice in the last
> month or so) on two machines. The rpm files I downloaded do not contain
> an rc.d/init.d style script, and I am wondering how many people here
> with RH start their fetchmail with such a script? If you do not want to
> poll for mail, but only download when you specifically want to, do you
> just run a command line for fetchmail to retrieve once? Do you run
> fetchmail as root (which seems to imply fetchmail will change its euid
> to the particular user it downloads as)?

I run fetchmail via cron to poll and by the command line if I want to run
it one time.  I run fetchmail as the user who wants to get his mail.
Fetchmail is not setuid or setgid.

Fetchmail uses an rc file (.fetchmailrc by default) to determine who to
poll and how to do so.  I have multiple fetchmailrc files depending on who
I'm pulling mail for, with multiple entries in each file for different
sites for that user.

Its actually one of the easier things to set up by hand, though ssh
tunneling was a bit of a pain the first time I tried it.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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